Heretofore, there has been known a control device capable of, in a situation where the behavior of a vehicle becomes unstable due to road wheel slip or the like, controlling the vehicle behavior to enable a safe traveling (e.g., an antiskid brake device). Specifically, there has been known a control device configured to detect that understeer or oversteer behavior occurs in a vehicle during vehicle cornering or the like, and apply an appropriate degree of deceleration to one or more road wheels so as to suppress such behavior.
There has also been known a vehicle motion control device configured to adjust a deceleration of a vehicle during vehicle cornering to thereby adjust a load to be applied to front road wheels as steerable road wheels so as to enable a series of driver's manipulations (braking, turning of a steering wheel, accelerating, turning-back of the steering wheel, etc.) during vehicle cornering under a normal traveling condition to be realized naturally and stably, differently from the aforementioned control for improving safety in a traveling condition causing the vehicle behavior to become unstable.
Further, there has been proposed a vehicle behavior control device configured to reduce a vehicle driving force (vehicle driving torque) according to yaw rate-related quantity corresponding to a steering wheel manipulation by a driver (e.g., yaw acceleration), thereby making it possible to quickly generate vehicle deceleration in response to the start of the steering wheel manipulation by the driver and thus quickly apply a sufficient load to front road wheels as steerable road wheels (see, for example, the following Patent Document 1). In this vehicle behavior control device, in response to the start of the steering wheel manipulation, a load is quickly applied to the front road wheels to cause an increase in frictional force between each of the front road wheels and a road surface and thus an increase in cornering force of the front road wheels, thereby providing an improved turn-in ability of the vehicle in an initial phase after entering a curve, and an improved responsivity with respect to a turning manipulation of a steering wheel (i.e., vehicle's steering stability). This makes it possible to realize a vehicle behavior as intended by the driver.